‘Tourettes’: The show must go on the offensive

Jamie DeWolf calls Oakland the natural place for “Tourettes Without Regrets.”

Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle

“I very famously, or infamously, to me, was knocked unconscious by the audience,” Jamie DeWolf remembers of an early performance of “Tourettes Without Regrets,” his monthly variety show. “I made a very classic punk rock mistake, which is to confuse aggression with comedy, to confuse anger with true vaudeville.”

DeWolf hadn’t yet realized that his audience “didn’t come here for you; they came to see a show.” As he was ranting, someone threw a piece of trash at him, so he urged the rest of the audience to do the same.

“One of my friends threw his backpack with some textbooks in it and just knocked me out cold. They dragged me out on the street and they left me there. Then someone else grabbed the mike, and the show kept going.”

With an aesthetic like that, it’s not hard to understand why DeWolf didn’t fit into the slam poetry scene in Benicia in the ’90s and thus why he created “Tourettes” in 1998.

DeWolf, 38, doesn’t have Tourette syndrome; the name reflects the show’s say-anything spirit. It also helps audiences self-select, or self-opt-out; if you’re offended by the name of the show, it’s a good bet you won’t enjoy the show itself.

Featuring up to 45 performers over three hours, “Tourettes” celebrates “what we view to be the actual Oakland,” where DeWolf moved the show in 2002. To him, “actual Oakland” means “all of these different voices — queer, feminist, people of color, people of all different kinds of bodies and abilities — and making a space for all of that to go all the way.”

Each first Thursday of the month, droves of audience members, many of them the young ones that more traditional performing arts covet, line up around the block to see the “Tourettes” crew go “all the way.” DeWolf and the performance poet Wonder Dave co-host; other regulars include the contortionist and burlesque performer Hunny Bunnah and beatboxer Syzygy.

The popularity of “Tourettes” is partly due to its always edgy, always evolving content; partly due to its $15 tickets. It’s also due to the way the show is set up — more like a sport event or a rock concert than a formal theatrical production. You’re not required to pay strict attention the whole time; you can get up to get a drink or go outside or talk with a companion at any time.

In fact, you probably couldn’t stay in one place the whole time even if you tried, so much audience participation does the show demand. You can even sign up, the night of, to perform your own stand-up or poetry. Rather than force you to pay attention, with traditional theatrical architecture, seating and norms, “Tourettes” dares you to.

In DeWolf’s 18 years of running and hosting the show, those dares have been in the form of games like pig heart baseball, dildo ring toss or “What’s down my pants?” (Various answers to that question: an octopus, dog food and a Rubik’s Cube.)

The dares have also meant poets reading “profoundly personal and confessional work,” directly followed by “mimes humping.” They’ve meant pole artists and aerialists followed by stand-up comedians, burlesque performers and sword swallowers, or freestyle rap battles next to dirty-haiku battles.

Battles abound in “Tourettes,” and the Thursday, Jan. 5, show, which has a loose “Star Trek” theme, will pioneer a new variation on the genre when comedians Ruby Gill and Liz Stone face off in a passive-aggressive-compliment battle. (The two were selected for the act in part because they’re friends in real life.)

DeWolf says that even if a particular act is wildly successful, he won’t book it again, at least not in the exact same permutation. Over the years, he’s learned to book fewer bands and eliminate the intermission — after which he always “had to go and re-find everybody.” Those moves have helped “keep the momentum going nonstop” and “keep the unpredictability of it alive.”

If the show is no longer quite so chaotic as it was in the days of DeWolf’s knockout, it still courts its audience’s umbrage. “One of the rules we have to start the show — we have a list — is to be offended,” DeWolf says.

“The point of it is that to be offended is the start of a conversation; it’s not the end of it. Most people just say, ‘I was offended,’ but they don’t really push past why.”

That rule makes Oakland a natural home for the show. “Oakland has always been a fierce city to me,” DeWolf says. “It’s almost like the front line for whatever’s happening even in the United States, whether it’s the riots, the protests, everything else. ... Oakland said ‘F— being polite’ a while ago. That’s one of the reasons why I think ‘Tourettes’ has done well here.”

Lily Janiak joined the San Francisco Chronicle as theater critic in May 2016. Previously, her writing appeared in Theatre Bay Area, American Theatre, SF Weekly, the Village Voice and HowlRound. She holds a BA in theater studies from Yale and an MA in drama from San Francisco State.